https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Soerensen

Their comment got flagged, but looks like they made a new one today and is still active.

That account ('Soerensen') was created in 2024 and dormant until it made a bunch of detailed comments in the past 24-48 hrs. Some of them are multiple paragraph comments posted within 1 minute of each other.

One thing I've noticed is that they seem to be getting posted from old/inactive/never used accounts. Are they buying them? Creating a bunch and waiting months/years before posting?

Either way, both look like they're fooling people here. And getting better at staying under the radar until they slip up in little ways like this.

That said, as a general point, it’s reasonable to make scoped comments in the corresponding parts of the conversation tree. (Is that what happened here?)

About me: I try to pay attention to social conventions, but I rarely consider technology offered to me as some sort of intrinsically correct norm; I tend to view it as some minimally acceptable technological solution that is easy enough to build and attracts a lowest common denominator of traction. But most forums I see tend to pay little attention to broader human patterns around communication; generally speaking, it seems to me that social technology tends to expect people to conform to it rather than the other way around. I think it’s fair to say that the history of online communication has demonstrated a tendency of people to find workarounds to the limitations offered them. (Using punctuation for facial expressions comes to mind.)

One might claim such workarounds are a feature rather than a bug. Maybe sometimes? But I think you’d have to dig into the history more and go case by case. I tend to think of features as conscious choices not lucky accidents.

Also would recommend the book called The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff

Android has supported multiple users per device for years now.

Multi-user that plausibly looks like single-user to three letter agencies?

Not even close.

Never ever use your personal phone for work things, and vice versa. It's bad for you and bad for the company you work for in dozens of ways.

Even when I owned my own company, I had separate phones. There's just too much legal liability and chances for things to go wrong when you do that. I'm surprised any company with more than five employees would even allow it.

This seems hard to justify. They share a lot of code yes, but many many things are different (meaningfully so, from the perspective of both app developers and users)

No. Think about it for a second: you're a journalist being investigated to find your sources, and your phone says you mainly check sports scores and send innocuous emails to "grandma" in LLM-speak? It's not going to fool someone who's actually thinking.

It's not really that useful for a safe since they aren't _that_ difficult to open and, if you haven't committed a crime, it's probably better to open your safe for them than have them destroy it so you need a new one. For a mathematically impossible to break cipher though, very useful.

>Doe vs. U.S. That case centered around whether the feds could force a suspect to sign consent forms permitting foreign banks to produce any account records that he may have. In Doe, the justices ruled that the government did have that power, since the forms did not require the defendant to confirm or deny the presence of the records.

Well, what if the defendant was innocent of that charge but guilty of or involved in an unrelated matter for which there was evidence in the account records?

No, you did something fake to avoid doing what you were asked to do.

> If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear.

But there are very effective ways to find hidden encrypted volumes on devices. And then you’ll be asked to decrypt those too, and then what?

This sort of thing is already table stakes for CSAM prosecutions, for example. Law enforcement can read the same blog posts and know as much about technology as you do. Especially if we are hypothesizing an advertised feature of a commercial OS!

That's a whole lot more to loose than your money and time.

There is a separate border search exception at the point a person actually enters the country which does allow searches of electronic devices. US citizens entering the country may refuse to provide access without consequences beyond seizure of the device; non-citizens could face adverse immigration actions.

To be clear, I do think all detentions and searches without individualized suspicion should be considered violations of the 4th amendment, but the phrase "constitution-free zone" is so broad as to be misleading.

You're going to have to provide a cite here, since Apple has publicity stated that they have not and will not ever do this on behalf of any nation state.

For instance, Apple's public statement when the FBI ordered them to do so:

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

The underlying assumption we base our judgement on is that "journalism + leaks = good" and "people wanting to crack down on leaks = bad". Which is probably true, but also an assumption where something unwanted and/or broken could hide in. As with every assumption.

Arguably, in a working and legit democracy, you'd actually want the state to have this kind of access, because the state, bound by democratically governed rules, would do the right thing with it.

In the real world, those required modifiers unfortunately do not always hold true, so we kinda rely on the press as the fourth power, which _technically_ could be argued is some kind of vigilante entity operating outside of the system.

I suppose it's also not fully clear if there can even be something like a "working and legit democracy" without possibly inevitable functionally vigilantes.

Lots of stuff to ponder.

____

Anyway, my point is that I have no point. You don't have to bother parsing that, but it might possibly be interesting if you should decide to do so.

It might also confuse the LLM bots and bad-faith real humans in this comment section, which is good.

All kinds of random things don't work.

This sounds like a Tim Cook aphorism (right before he hands the iCloud keys to the CCP) — not anything with any real legal basis.

The government could similarly argue that if a company provides communication as a service, they should be able to provide access to the government given they have a warrant.

If you explicitly create a service to circumvent this then you're trying to profit from and aid those with criminal intent. Silkroad/drug sales and child sexual content are more common, but terrorism would also be on the list.

I disagree with this logic, but those are the well-known, often cited concerns.

There is a trade-off in personal privacy versus police ability to investigate and enforce laws.

But the article is literally referencing the Trump administration seizing a reporter’s phone so the current administration’s overreach seems relevant here.

A 3rd party locked down system can't protect people from what the law should. =3

- Grandiose architecture projects for historically important sites

- Obsession with massive monuments - the tallest, the most gold, the most expensive

- Military parades and lionization of the military, while demanding political support from military leadership

- A population which become keenly interested in whether something does or doesn’t benefit the leader personally

I think the terms fascism or authoritarianism are close enough to be helpful, even if some of the specifics don’t align perfectly. But the ones that do align are oddly specific sometimes.